Abstract: The themes in this issue overlap in instructive ways and reflect multiple angles on femininity, masculinity, and the transnational influences on postwar consumerism. They offer new perspectives on feminist global networks and black women's internationalism; address the sexual politics of military occupation in Japan and dictatorship in Thailand; and refract feminist debates through such popular magazines as Ms. and Vogue as well as responses to foreign films. In addition, a number of authors capture intriguing themes of difference that historically disrupted a singular feminist narrative of identity and simultaneously utilize the intersectional methodologies made possible by accommodating such differences. Three ... Read More PubDate: 2019-03-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In September 1937, the Assembly of the League of Nations adopted a resolution that commissioned a "comprehensive study, giving full information on the legal status enjoyed by women in various countries of the world."1 To implement this decision, the Council of the League of Nations nominated an expert committee consisting of four women and three men. Feminists were excited. "We feel that the bringing of the question before the League of Nations is an important step in the history of women's emancipation," a group dominated by the militant equalitarians Alice Paul and Doris Stevens exclaimed. The International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (IAW) similarly expressed its satisfaction and invited ... Read More PubDate: 2019-03-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 1905, 30-year-old Nannie Helen Burroughs attained international acclaim for speeches she gave at the inaugural meeting of the Baptist World Congress in London. Burroughs, secretary of the Woman's Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention USA (NBC-USA), regaled spectators with an oratory—infused with wit and pathos—that impressed the need not only to provide increased mission support for "my brethren" in Africa but also to recognize the signal place of black women in stewarding Christianity in foreign lands. Noting that the salvation of the race depended upon the "highest development of womanhood," Burroughs, to applause, acknowledged that "the women of my own race are taking up the Cross and are making ... Read More PubDate: 2019-03-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The occupation of Japan after World War II officially started on September 2, 1945. The exclusively male surrender ceremony, where officials signed the Instrument of Surrender, took place on the US battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. General Douglas MacArthur, acting Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), closed the ceremony with a speech addressing the hope for a peaceful future of Japan and stating that "a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded upon faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance and justice."1 Despite such emphasis on reconciliation, the ceremony was a ... Read More PubDate: 2019-03-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: On February 24, 1972, the Board of Film Censorship of Thailand met for an official screening of the Ingmar Bergman production The Touch.1 The board had previously banned the film, which was about a violent romance between a Swedish housewife and her American lover. Their decision explained that "the film depicts adultery [kan khop chu] between a woman, who has a family already, and her husband's male friend. The story violates the good morality [sinlatham] and customs [prapheni] of the Thai people. Not only does the depiction of the adulterous relationship [khwam samphan thang chu sao] show behavior contrary to morality, but it has characteristics that will arouse sexual desire [yuayu kamarom]."2 Twentieth-Century ... Read More PubDate: 2019-03-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 1963, Betty Friedan's groundbreaking monograph The Feminine Mystique hit American bookstores. An immediate bestseller, the book sought to expose "the problem" that "lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women": that "in the fifteen years after the Second World War," a "mystique of feminine fulfillment" had become "the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture."1Friedan believed that a renewed and restrictive veneration for the domestic emanated from multiple sources like misogynistic psychoanalysis, exploitative American advertisers, and sexist colleges.2 Above all, Freidan blamed women's magazines for the "problem which has no name." She maintained that it was ... Read More PubDate: 2019-03-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In February 1978, the cover of Ms. magazine featured a red, heart-shaped box surrounded by chocolate-covered question marks. Emblazoned across the top of the box was the question "Is There Love after Liberation'"1 With this tongue-in-cheek nod to the commercialized holiday of Valentine's Day, Ms. drew attention to a serious issue for contemporary feminists. Inside, the editors elaborated, "We used to think love was being dependent, giddy, possessed, and the only way of finding ourselves. Now we know it isn't. But do our hearts agree'" The symposium that followed aimed to answer that question via personal testimonies woven together with excerpts from notable works of feminist theory that interrogated the historical ... Read More PubDate: 2019-03-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Talitha LeFlouria and Sarah Haley offer powerful narratives on Georgia's carceral system. Both scholars join an impressive cohort of historians, including Kelley Hernandez, Dan Berger, Heather Thompson, and Kali Gross, whose recent publications focus on the roots of crime and punishment, the varying contours of legal confinement, and the different ways that mass incarceration impacted racial and ethnic minority communities.1 At the same time, Chained in Silence and No Mercy Here advance scholarship on the carceral state and deepen historians' interpretations of crime and punishment. Their exhaustive accounts place postbellum Georgia within national histories of and conversations about human caging. Both texts ... Read More PubDate: 2019-03-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: According to Achille Mbembe, "given the degeneracy and vice that, from the colonial viewpoint, characterized native life, colonialism found it necessary to rein in the abundant sexuality of the native, to tame his or her spirit, police his/her body."1 Mbembe characterized colonialism as a disciplining, violent field of force determined to transform indigenous Africans into economically useful and socially compliant modern subjects. The texts under review qualify the degree and methods with which colonial states intervened in the practices of African women and girls. Jessica Cammaert and Saheed Aderinto historicize the detrimental gendered effects of British indirect rule in Gold Coast/Ghana and Nigeria. Their work ... Read More PubDate: 2019-03-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Two colonial Latin Americanists have recently made landmark contributions to the study of the history of law. Michelle McKinley's Fractional Freedoms and Bianca Premo's Enlightenment on Trial both study the uses to which disempowered people put the court system, focusing on gender and race as intertwined categories of analysis. Their studies yield particularly rich results even for scholars outside the realm of legal history.McKinley frankly acknowledges that in the past generation there has been "a veritable boom in studies examining slaves' entanglement with the law" (7). Like many who study Latin America, she has found herself responding to the historian Frank Tannenbaum's thesis in Slave and Citizen (1947) that ... Read More PubDate: 2019-03-13T00:00:00-05:00
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